The Wolverine
By
Richard Cotton
It was as I visited the tubby Factor at James Bay in Northern Ontario Canada that John Mactavish showed me some traps that the hunters used to trap Beavers that a Cree trapper rushed into the post. John looked at him with his brown eyes and knew something was wrong. This been the height of trapping season and all. John also knew that Little Elk was far from his normal hunting grounds. Has he lived well up to the North in his log cabin, which was sixty miles north of the post. Little Elk spoke in broken English. He told us that his first few months of hunting had gone well catching Martin, Ermine and Fox pelts a plenty, but the as the weeks passed this began to trail off when a rouge Wolverine had moved in on his hunting territory. It was on one morning that Little Elk got fed up has he found his trap line ruined yet again. He decided there and then to rid himself of the pesky beast.
Deciding that a more modern steel trap was to simple for his wily enemy. He went with his hunting wolf-husky. The first thing he did was build a line of deadfalls in the hope this would stop it. The swift death type of log trap used by generations of his forebears. Has he did this he crossed fresh tracks of his new foe. On one set of the tracks he noticed a growl coming from his trusty dog. A sure sign that the Wolverine was not far away. Little Elk pulled out the rifle he carried in the holder on his back and let lose his dog. The large beast bounded off through the grass into the bushes. Little Elk kept an eye on the bushes to judge a point where the Wolverine would come out. But it stayed in them making sure that he couldn’t get to it. So little Elk forced himself through them. He came out in a clearing where he saw the Wolverine and his dog in a fight.
By now it had the dog on its back and its jaws around its throat so that little Elk was unable to shoot for fear of hitting his own dog. So he reversed the rifle and was going to club it with the butt. He only manage to get a swipe in and that only brushed the left hand side gently as the beast let go of the dog and vanished into the bush. Little did try to get a shot in, but by the time he had lined up a shot the beast had managed to get back into the thick bushes. After it had gone little Elk bent down to check on his dog, but it had died from a severed jugular.
More embittered than ever little Elk set out building a heavy trap, but by late afternoon a rain storm had set in. Little Elk made camp for the night keeping warm by the fire he had made from what dry wood he had found and setting it alight with the tinder box he carried. Little Elk hung his leather bag up on a high branch to stop any wondering animal from getting what was inside. He curled up to the fire and drifted off to a light sleep. But in the morning he awoke to find his bag had been shredded by the Wolverine somehow. Now he was low on food. He decided to hide the equipment he needed to make the traps to go for some food. He had only gone an hour, but on his return he found that his blanket had now been shredded and his tinder box had vanished. To round it off the precious rifle had also been dragged away.
Forcing back the little panic he now felt he decided to return to his humble hut. The sun was setting when he reached the small wooden building, but even in the dim light he could see that he door had been broken open. The Wolverine had methodically destroyed his entire catch of pelts, eaten what it could of his food and defecated on anything it couldn’t eat.
Has Little Elk finished off his story John the Factor decided to give this poor man some credit for blankets, traps and a rifle. He also gave him food, then watched as the Cree went off to battle with the Wolverine. Once he had gone I remarked that never before had I heard a fantastic yarn in all my years. John walked to the bookshelf in the store and lifted off the second shelf a small booklet prepared by the Hudson Bay Company for professional trappers. John brought it over to where he stood. He opened it to one page that he wanted to show me and pointed to the relevant passage: ‘When the Wolverine appears on the trappers patch the trapper has two alternatives. He must either trap the Wolverine, or give up trapping’
“You see Tom it might have been a fantastic story aye” John admitted, “Yet I’ve know many a man who have suffered the same fate as no other creature in the north equals that of the Wolverine”
